


a girl so in love with the wrong world

by cherishiskisa



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Gen, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 20:21:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1085296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherishiskisa/pseuds/cherishiskisa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What am I going to do? Maybe I should do something drastic with my hair. Maybe then the courtiers and handmaidens will notice me, the next time I come by the castle.” She pauses, and amends, “Well, they do notice me. But maybe they’ll notice me in a way that doesn’t make them yell ‘she’s a witch’ and push me out of the ball.”</p><p>the first sketch in a series of medieval/fantasy/fairytale au things</p>
            </blockquote>





	a girl so in love with the wrong world

**Author's Note:**

> hey there!! tumblr user epwnine sent me a bunch of asks yesterday about a hypothetical faux-medieval era fantasy au with dragons and witches and errant knights and long-lost siblings and minstrels and curses etc etc etc and i couldn't not write something for it  
> so here is the first in a series of drabbles/ficlets about it  
> the next one will be about enjolras and grantaire so stay tuned for that  
> i hope you enjoy this!! pls leave me a review if you do, or talk to me on my blog which is queerfeuilly.co.vu  
> uwu yes thanks for reading <3

Sunrise over the forest.

Éponine Thérnadier, witch-in-training, is awoken by the sound of her familiar coming home.

“Good morning,” she greets, politely.

Her familiar responds in bat language—as usual—which means that Éponine has no idea what she just said. Éponine is learning bat language, but it’s a slow process, and besides—she’s not at her most alert in the mornings, anyway.

“I set out some fruit for you last night. And bugs. Did you eat them already?”

Chirping from the bat, which sounds like an affirmative if Éponine strains to hear.

“You’re welcome.”

Éponine slides out of her bed and down the wooden beam that she uses as a ladder. Once she’s at the bottom, she looks up at the beam critically. It’s marked with gashes from knives—the only way she can get up is to grapple and carve hand- and foot-holds.

“I’ll start getting splinters in painful places soon enough unless I do something about this.”

She places one of her hands on the wood, and closes her eyes. After a moment, though, she realizes that she doesn’t remember the appropriate spell and, grumbling, goes off to find her mother’s book.

On the way, she gets distracted by the sight of her poison garden through the window.

“The hemlock is blooming. Is it supposed to do that?”

Silence from Azelma, the bat. She’s probably sleeping already. Éponine looks up at the rafters and sees that yes, her familiar and her sister is asleep.

“It’s December. I don’t think it’s hemlock’s blooming season yet. D’you think it’s an omen?”

More silence.

To fill the silence, Éponine begins to hum to herself—a melody she’d picked up on one of her most recent trips to the castle during a ball. From the way the enchanted vine that makes up half of her cottage begins to squirm, she can assume that it likes her singing. So she sings louder, and the roof shakes with delight.

Eventually—after sorting through her jewelry box and watering the indoor herbs through the incubator-bubble—Éponine makes it to the chest where her mother’s spellbook is held, and mutters the password. The chest unlocks, and Éponine withdraws the dusty tome. It takes her a while to find the appropriate page and the appropriate spell, and a while longer to translate it out. By the time she’s done with that, she’s hungry enough for breakfast that she decides fixing the beam isn’t _that_ pressing of an issue and can wait.

Upon magicking up a small fire, Éponine starts looking around for something to eat (or something that can be transformed into something edible). She catches sight of herself in a mirror—one of the ones that isn’t enchanted to speak, or doesn’t contain the cursed soul of a distant relative—and frowns, one hand coming up to poke at her cheek.

“My skin tone is abysmal,” she complains half-heartedly to Azelma, “and I have _got_ to make those stupid boys bring me some more of that wonderful kohl.” As it is, her hair is a tangled mess (but she likes it that way; she even weaves pretty feathers into it, sometimes), her eyes look wild (because they are), and her red, red mouth is looking more raspberry than anything.

There is a very slight chirp from the drowsy bat. Éponine focuses, and interprets it to mean, “Look out.”

“What? For what? Why?”

She smells something burning, and, with a gasp, turns around to see that her little fire has gotten slightly out of hand. She quickly puts it under control under a hastily conjured incubator-bubble, and then turns back around to frown into the mirror again.

“What am I going to do? Maybe I should do something drastic with my hair. Maybe then the courtiers and handmaidens will notice me, the next time I come by the castle.” She pauses, and amends, “Well, they do notice me. But maybe they’ll notice me in a way that doesn’t make them yell ‘she’s a witch’ and push me out of the ball.”

Azelma is asleep again, which doesn’t make much of a difference since she didn’t care that much even when she was awake.

Éponine spends a few minutes pinching her cheeks to make them redder and admiring herself in the mirror, and then she decides to go and get some food.

“What day is it today?” she wonders to herself, and quickly closes her eyes so she can attune herself with the surroundings and the universe. She calculates that it’s been exactly a fortnight since she last saw her father, so today is the day of their next scheduled interaction. This is good, because Éponine isn’t sure she has any real sustenance left to eat at her cottage.

It takes her a while to get dressed. Winter is always difficult for Éponine Thérnadier, especially when she has to go outside. But she manages to assemble a decent outfit: several layers of skirts all woven out of enchanted fabrics that blend in with her surroundings, a rabbit-fur coat, and the hat of a jester she had once stolen (she had stolen both the hat and the jester). She stares glumly at the holes in the toes of her best boots, but decides to leave the mending for later. She puts on her second-best pair, instead, and wiggles her toes happily against the fur lining.

“That’ll do it,” she decides, and, basket of poultices in hand, sets out into the woods.

The woods are dark, even if the sun has already risen. In winter, especially. So Éponine conjures up a little ball of light that bobs ahead of her as she walks, lighting her path to the clearing in which she and her father usually meet.

When she gets there an indeterminate amount of time later, the clearing is covered with freshly fallen snow, and devoid of any prints that would signify the presence of someone else there. Éponine walks to the middle of the clearing, and softly calls, “Father?”

She waits. Somewhere, a bird of prey shrieks as it catches sight of something to eat.

“Father?” again. “I’ve brought you some poultices, in case you’re still not fully healed.”

The bushes and branches that are where the clearing ends, opposite from her, rustle.

And a large, grey wolf emerges, carrying a bundle of fur in his mouth.

Éponine can’t help a smile. “Hello, Father.”

The wolf doesn’t answer except for a huff of air.

“Is your paw better?”

She kneels down a little, setting the basket down by her side.

“Do you like this basket? I wove it myself. Well, technically, it wove itself, but…”

The wolf, her father, pads closer to her, and she opens the basket.

“Come here. Let me see your paw.”

Carefully, the wolf approaches her, lifting his left front paw into Éponine’s lap. She examines it, and makes an approving sound. “Looks like you’ve been being careful this time. Let me take care of it a little, anyway, just in case. What have you brought me today?”

As she works on applying some salves and heating poultices to the wolf’s paw, the wolf sits down and deposits the bundle of fur—which Éponine can now identify as a rabbit or two—by the side of Éponine’s basket.

“Thank you very much, Father,” she says, smiling, as she finishes treating the almost-healed wound. She doesn’t think she’ll be able to remove the arrowhead without some serious magic, but she doesn’t have the spell memorized and doesn’t want to bring the book out here, and her father has never trusted her enough to go all the way back to her cottage. “Have the boys been to visit you yet? They’re due to. Unless they’ve all finally gotten trapped and jailed for good.”

Her father doesn’t respond except for another huff of air. She takes that to mean no.

“I haven’t seen them in a while, either. I hope they bring me something nice to make up for their prolonged absence. Are you impressed with my vocabulary? I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, since I took some holy books from the castle the last time I was there. I thought I couldn’t read their language at all, but then I found a spell in Mother’s book and it helped me.”

The wolf seems unimpressed. He removes his paw from Éponine’s lap, and runs around the clearing briefly to test out how it feels. His daughter watches him and smiles, meanwhile putting the rabbits into her basket. She silently thanks them for their suffering on her behalf and their contribution to her health.

And then, without much warning—just a brief look back at her—the wolf pushes through the bushes and vanishes off into the dark forest.

Éponine wipes her hands off and sighs. “No use wishing he’d talk to me,” she murmurs to herself, and stands up, taking her basket along.

She trudges back to her cottage, experimenting with making the orb of light change colors and sizes with basic shape-shifting spells as she walks. She also contemplates curses, and how powerful her mother must have been to curse as many people as she did with that great of an intensity.

When she gets back home, she takes a moment to briefly poke around in her poison garden. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be blooming,” she tells the hemlock, sternly. It looks a little guilty, and she pats it on a burst of flowers to make it feel slightly better. She examines the rest of her garden, too, and is pleased to note that her moonseed plant has recovered from whatever it was sick with, and that her foxglove is absolutely flourishing. “I am so proud of you all for being so resilient through this winter,” she says to her plants. The belladonna seems to stand a little straighter at the praise, and she smiles at them all fondly. “Good girls.”

The oleander looks offended.

“And boys,” she corrects herself.

It looks more appeased at that, and she goes inside.

“Father brought us some rabbits!” she announces to Azelma happily, trying for a fleeting instant to remember her sister, before. The instant is too fleeting for her to actually be able to remember properly. “I know you won’t want any of them, but the offer is out there, anyway.”

She dissipates the incubator-bubble above the fire, and transfers the fire into the space designated for it, below where her mother’s cauldron and her turning-stick rest. Éponine carefully removes the cauldron, and allows the fire to grow a little, heating the cottage as it does. Meanwhile, she uses a quick spell to prepare the rabbits for cooking, and goes out to the small stream her mother had harnessed a few years before disappearing to wash up. The water is cold and it makes Éponine feel awake and alive, and she goes back into the cottage in a very good mood.

She skewers the rabbits, and sets the stick over the fire. Trying with all her might, she eventually remembers the spell that will turn the stick at a constant rate until the rabbits are done just perfectly, and executes it. This spell is the first one she has used this morning that requires actual power, and she feels it sparking through her sooty fingertips and glowing bright behind her strange, wild eyes. She makes a happy sound, toes curling a little in her boots in pleasure.

“Oh, Azelma, I do love magic ever so much.”

She sits by the fire for a few minutes, watching the rabbits rotate.

“I hope no travellers come by today. I’m not in the kind of mood where I’d be able to deal with them. It would be nice to see the boys today, though. They always have such funny stories to tell us.”

Éponine finally remembers to take off her jesters’ hat, and she hangs it up on the wall with a basic flying spell. Power sizzles through her veins, and she giggles, absently scratching at the inside of her elbow where it always tingles the most.

She sits there, and waits for her meal to finish cooking, and brings out one of the books she’d stolen from the castle on her last visit. Éponine ends up getting so engrossed in her reading that the rabbits burn a little, but she’s learned at least ten new words, so it’s worth it in her eyes.

When she’s scraped off most of the charring and sat down at the table to eat, she offers some of her food to Azelma, who is still asleep and therefore cannot answer. Éponine wistfully tries to remember her sister, again, but gives up soon. Instead, she thinks some more about the kind of power it takes to turn people irreversibly into animals, and the kind of person her mother must have been.

She thinks about where her mother must be now.

“With that kind of power?” Éponine says out loud, laughing a little. “I bet she could be Queen by now.”

Little does Éponine know that she’s not wrong… 


End file.
